Anthropic's Latest Ad Sparks Unease with Dark Imagery and Dystopian Tone

Anthropic is known for its creative marketing, but the AI company may have been a little bit too creative when it conjured up its most recent advertisement. Titled “There’s hope in hard questions,” the company’s latest ad has been unsettling viewers with its weird imagery and doomer-ist tone. The ad begins with a video of a burning house before pivoting to a series of still images, including a crowd of people being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be a group of laborers toiling in a mine.

A voice-over track features different people asking questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?” Sam Altman, the CEO of Anthropic’s chief rival, kicked off the criticism with some pithy trolling. “i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something,” Altman posted to X on Monday. Other skeptics, many of whom seem to work in the tech industry, came out of the woodwork to remark upon Anthropic’s odd choice of imagery and tone.

“Anthropic is quite an amazing company. With the worst corporate communications ever,” another person said. “the EAs [effective altruists] at anthropic really must be living in a bubble of ai psychosis to think this would go down well,” a critical poster remarked.

As some have pointed out, Anthropic is following a very time-tested marketing playbook here. That playbook involves a brand calling out and owning the harms caused by its industry as a way to demonstrate that it is the company best positioned to avoid or correct those harms. But even if it’s a familiar playbook, it seems to have backfired here — particularly the decision to include a brief shot that appears to be from Arlington National Cemetary.

“I can’t stress enough how fucked up it is that Anthropic is running an ad that includes this image asking “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to”,” said one commenter, sharing the cemetary image that appears in the ad. People kept coming back to the graveyard imagery. “Out of everything in that ad this part was exceptionally weird and sinister,” another person wrote, sharing the same image.

Anthropic’s marketing has made a splash before. In February, during the Super Bowl, the company unleashed a slew of ads that humorously took aim at OpenAI’s decision to include ads in ChatGPT. Those ads earned it a good amount of positive buzz — as well as the smoldering rage of its competitor.

Why this matters: Anthropic's misstep with this ad highlights the challenges of marketing in the AI industry, where companies must balance showcasing their awareness of potential harms with avoiding perceptions of insensitivity or opportunism. The backlash against this ad suggests that Anthropic may have misread its audience, and that its attempt to position itself as a responsible AI developer may have fallen flat. As the AI industry continues to grow and grapple with complex issues like ethics and accountability, companies like Anthropic will need to tread carefully in their marketing efforts to avoid alienating their audiences.